Thanks for this very interesting post! It brings to discussion a sensitive political topic: whether to promote “economic growth” is a cost-effective cause area.
I take your invite to open the discussion and share a couple of comments:
5.4 Politisation
I personally see the option of growth increase as a political idea competing to the ones you also recognize: “reducing inequality, or improving state responsiveness and state capability”. Each one of these topics is very complex. It is very difficult to decide whether we should prioritize one over the others. As it is so hard to study them, to translate the assumptions into figures and to prove whether the predictions are validated, some bias based on personal values and political preferences is always influencing each person’s selection of the top one. Also, we have to take into account that work improving one of them may diminish the other.
With regards to your proposal of “a 4 person-year research effort would find donation opportunities working on growth” I suspect it could take more than 4 person-years of debate to create a consensus in the community that we should prioritize growth over inequality 😉 It might be more effective to take 4 people to explore opportunities in growth, 4 people in inequality reduction and 4 people in state responsiveness and capability, rather than figuring out which one of those should go first.
Thanks for this very interesting post! It brings to discussion a sensitive political topic: whether to promote “economic growth” is a cost-effective cause area.
I take your invite to open the discussion and share a couple of comments:
5.4 Politisation
I personally see the option of growth increase as a political idea competing to the ones you also recognize: “reducing inequality, or improving state responsiveness and state capability”. Each one of these topics is very complex. It is very difficult to decide whether we should prioritize one over the others. As it is so hard to study them, to translate the assumptions into figures and to prove whether the predictions are validated, some bias based on personal values and political preferences is always influencing each person’s selection of the top one. Also, we have to take into account that work improving one of them may diminish the other.
With regards to your proposal of “a 4 person-year research effort would find donation opportunities working on growth” I suspect it could take more than 4 person-years of debate to create a consensus in the community that we should prioritize growth over inequality 😉
It might be more effective to take 4 people to explore opportunities in growth, 4 people in inequality reduction and 4 people in state responsiveness and capability, rather than figuring out which one of those should go first.